The eighteenth century was apparently coquetting only with
Eastern motifs. If Chinese palaces put in their appearance at
Drottningholm and Pillnitz, in all portions of the continent; if
Chippendale began giving curious delicate twists to his furniture, it
seemed nothing more than a matter of caprice. The zest for Persian
letters, Oriental nouvelles, Turkish marches, arose apparently only
from the desire for masquerade. Gretry, Mozart, Wieland, scarcely took
their seraglios, pashas, bulbuls earnestly. But, gradually, with the
arrival of the nineteenth century, what had hitherto seemed play only,
began to assume a different shape. The East was indeed dawning upon the
West again. The mists were being burned away. Through Sir William Jones
and Friedrich Schlegel, the wisdom of the dangerous slippery Indies was
opened to Europe. Goethe, as ever the outrider, revealed the new
orientation in his "West-Oestlicher Divan" and his "Chinesich-Deutsche
Jahres-und-Tages-Zeiten." In 1829, Victor Hugo published "Les
Orientales"; in 1859, Fitzgerald his "Omar." If Weber little more than
toyed with Chinese and Turkish musical color in "Turandot" and in
"Oberon," Felicien David in his songs and in his "Le Desert" attempted
seriously to infiltrate into European music the musical feeling of the
Levant. In the corner of Schopenhauer's apartment there sat an effigy of
the Buddha; volumes of the Upanishads lay on his table. In 1863 for the
first time, a Paris shop offered for sale a few Japanese prints. Manet,
Whistler, Monet, the brothers De Goncourt came and bought. But though
the craze for painting Princesses du Pays de la Porcelaine ended
rapidly, European painting was revolutionized. Surfaces once more came
into being. Color was born again under the brushes of the impressionists
and the post-impressionists. The sense of touch was freed. In all the
arts the art of Japan became powerful. De Maupassant wrote a prose that
is full of the technique of the Japanese prints; that works chiefly
through means of sharp little lines and dainty spotting. All five senses
were being born again. People listened with new keenness to the sounds
of instruments. The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral
chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle.
Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery.

And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately
assumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and